Kancolle: End of the Past, Start of the Future
by Chunnibu
Summary: What if Kanmusu have become forgotten, outdated, and outclassed by the advancement of technology, many years after their creation? Join them as they find tier way around the new universe. References taken from too many other universes to put under crossover, so yea. Special Thanks to Hieda no Akyuu for igniting my inner Chunnibyou through his stories.
1. Chapter 1

So Hello Everyone, This is the first Fanfiction that I have ever written, and I wrote it kinda as it came to me. so please, give me some pointers and comment, help would be real nice as I have no idea how to write anything besides reports (no thank you IB and English Class)

* * *

September 21, 2256

Shipboard Time: 1000

Location: Battleship _HMS Gunther Lutjens_, Interstellar Space near junction of Orion and Sagittarius Arms

"Commodore, there is some sort of ship on the sensors, it is rather large, would you like the task force to drop out of warp?" said a rather tall and lanky man, who appeared in his late teens

"We have time to kill, why not, Captain?" responded a very young looking girl, who appeared no older than sixteen, with long blonde hair and piercing sky blue eyes and somewhat baby-like features unbefitting of a commander of a Royal Navy Commander.

"We need to have the destroyers stop to do maintenance on their warp arrays anyway, better to have something to kill time with."

Back on the Bridge, Captain Jean Maxim, ordered full stop, relative to unknown object.

Ten minutes later, strapped in a spacesuit and in a Humpback transport vehicle, he find himself on the mysterious object. The long, dark corridors leading to the central cylinder from the abandoned spaceport, which was little more than an open space with a broken airlock.

_Jean Maxim, bro, you are out of your mind, crawling into an unknown alien vessel alone_, he thought to himself as he ventured farther into the unknown space station.

Finally, in the heart of the abandoned space colony, he saw a derelict building. At one time in the past, it might have been some great mansion, roman columns around the verandah, lush green gardens around it, and people running back and forth, going about their business within the mansion. Now, it was just another cold, dead building, floating in space.

Inside, he ventured into the basement, which curiously, was the only door that was not locked. down in the first basement, which was cavernous, something no one outside the colony would be able to explain. He found what appeared to be cryotubes, all frosted over by the random molecules of water floating the vast expanse of space, and on the inside, which still appeared to be pressurized, indicating that there was something alive in the tube, though his bio-detector did not register anything alive in the room beyond himself. Looking up, he saw many similar tubes, all frosted over so that the face of whatever was inside was obscured. Curiosity taking over from his better judgement, he approached the nearest tube, he nearly overlooked the small plaque below the window, which said

SECOND BATTLESHIP OF NAGATO CLASS: MUTSU

Upon brushing the frost aside, it revealed….himself.

Albeit, himself if he were a girl, almost the same spitting image, especially in the face. Frost covered her cheeks, which were a very lifeless pale white. Here eyes were shut, but they did not appear dead, only in sleep.

Jean screamed, a scream that reverberated through the microphones of the other people on the colony, and caused the communications officer back on _Gunther Lutjens_ to jump off his post and hit his head on the tuning console above him.

"Guys, you might want to come to my location, I think I got something you guys might want to take a look at, looks like still functioning cryotubes, this colony was sent out by a primitive human world quite sometime ago, which would explain why it was even here in the first place" Jean said curtly into his helmet microphone before switching it off.

"Now, let's see what else we have here…"

* * *

2 hours later back on the ship in the infirmary. The ship doctor, Marie Passio, had 24 cry tubes to lug around with only the help of 3 assistants, 2 of them volunteers from the damage control team that was off duty. Not only that, but it was compounded by the fact that Marie was a diminutive girl of 17, she had waist length, long slightly blue hair, red-orange eyes, and a sharp tongue to match.

"What are you idiots doing, you're so clumsy with those tubes! They are human lives you know, they are just as important, no, more important than you are! UUUUUGHHHHHH GET OUT ILL DO IT MY SELF"

After kicking the the two volunteers out of the infirmary, she goes to each of the tubes and cleans it before heaving it onto a cot. Having no experience with the matter, she sent out her assistant as well.

She uses the intercom to call in Captain Maxim and the other blonde girl. Time to open these tubes and see who's inside. The two commanders were quite curious, especially because the ones that have been slightly defrosted to reveal people that had striking resemblance to several of the ship's crew, and because of that, they also brought in the crew that had resemblance to the girls in the tubes. For some reason, they were all female, save for Maxim.

The only person with cryotube operation experience present, Shevonne Passio, was also coincidentally one of the people that had a resemblance to the girls in the tubes. Proceeding to the first one that Jean found, she pressed some buttons and changed the settings on a couple screws and after several minutes, with a very loud hiss, the tube opens.

Inside was a girl in her late teens, wearing very little, a white miniskirt with mahogany trim, what appeared to be a white with black trim sports bra, and strangely, a hairband that had two forward facing prongs that gave her the impression of a slug. Looking at her, Maxim sighed, he has run into plenty of surreal things in his two years with the task force, but no one had ever run into their own doppelganger.

After a quick medical check-up, and finding nothing wrong, Marie turns to Jean and says "There really is nothing wrong with her aside from the fact that she's cold out, literally", I need room of the other cryotubes in the infirmary, so I'm gonna cart her over to your room, it only seems appropriate. You meanwhile, need to keep watch over her on your own time and DON'T YOU DARE DO ANYTHING SUSPICIOUS TO HER"

With that last sentence everyone is once again kicked out, mostly in disappointment at not being able to meet their look-alike, they were only really going to attempt to thaw them one at a time to keep the number of "new people" on the ship to a minimum, but there were some rather interesting finds.

One in particular, Battleship Bismark, held much more than a passing resemblance to the Commodore, Minerva Zabi, She infact, looked like her, older by another three years. Larger breasts, taller, much more regal in facial features, and looking more like a battlefield valkyria to Minerva's petite "born rich southern belle" figure, but at the moment, she is of little consequence as she is still in the cryotube.

* * *

Mutsu's eyes fluttered open, her body felt really numb, and she was unable to move anything beyond her eyes and turning her head. She heard soft clicking to her left, but the bed, it was wonderously soft, it was unlike the cold hard cryotube that she was forced into immediately after her commissioning. She was unable to form any words in her mouth, she still hadn't regained control of even her own mouth yet, but she noticed the person on the chair to her left. A man, that looked nearly exactly like her, from the short, light auburn hair, to even the hair that seemed to point in the same ways and the lime-green eyes. He appeared to be playing an ancient game console of some sort, the controller looked like a trident and had an analog stick down the middle, and when the level seemed to be over, the screen displayed MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, before rolling the credits. As the credits started rolling, the man turned around:

"I see that you're awake, welcome aboard _HMS Gunther Lutjens_, I am Captain Jean Maxim, captain of the ship and Task force executive Officer, nice to meet you." He tried to smile, but his smile could never hide his nervousness because, come on, Jean had never had such a beautiful girl ever in his room before, much less sleeping in his own bed (Without him in it!)

Mutsu replied "Then where is everyone else? Am I the only one that you found? What about Nagato-neesan?" in a very quick manner, with much concern in her voice.

"Whoa, whoa, slow down there, we got a bunch of you guys out of that space colony out there", said Jean while pointing out the window, "And we only defrosted you, we'll bring you up to speed real quick."


	2. Chapter 2

Minerva looked out the window from her quarters, she sighed wistfully as the derelict colony orbited into view and as she remembered the things she learned in her history class back in Berlina University so many years ago…

_It has been nearly 200 years since Humanity has began exploring space, there are three countries that have emerged from the tyranny of the Planetary Federation. Her country and the country of her fleet, Empire Mars Europa based on Mars proper (Basically a unified Europe), the Federation of Zimmerit (a new iteration of Japan, really), and finally, The Earth Republic, everyone else. _

_We have fought each other and with each other, in the Solar Wars, and against the Altir Combine, an alien theocracy that broke due to civil war after 10 long years of combat, the Altirs have since broken back into their constituent races as individual nations. _

_What was even more unusual, was the discovery of multiple Earths, as only 4 years ago, they had observed an Earth on the brink of breaking the Lightspeed barrier. Multiple Earths adds the dynamic of meeting your genetic twin, almost literally. The revelation that there was an ancient world building civilization of some sort and the new strain of humanity, known as the Innovators, humans that were biologically immortal and had some telepathic powers, almost as if they were meant to explore space…_

And that was what Minerva was, she was one of them, they made up a steady 20% of the nearly 2 trillion humans in the known universe. Innovators often stopped maturing past their mid teens to early 20's, so they all appeared very young, a balancing factor though, was the difficulty in reproduction that innovators had.

"hmm…" She said to herself, things were getting interesting, as they were ending a long three month patrol of the edge of human territory. time to head home, nearly 1000 light-years away and a 2 week journey. She turned back to her computer screen, to type her report…

"Maybe Derwent was right", she whispers to herself, "maybe there is some sort of conspiracy behind all of the recent revelations in space exploration". She stops typing for a moment and crosses her arms, pondering the words of her dead lover and last executive officer before Maxim, he was supposed to have been promoted to Commodore, like her and given a task force to command, given his family's standing with the navy and his elder sibling's connections. That all ended when he was lost 6 years ago during the chaos of the Battle of Cygnus, where his mobile suit was pushed too close to the nearby supergiant, and he fell to his death. Bitterly, she returns to her work with the thoughts of how ironic it would be for him to be alive today to see this, how his words somehow came true, that there would eventually be a supersoldier-esque look-alike to certain people that had great combat abilities or great telepathic abilities. Also, he once said that there was probably some higher civilization, a theoretical extragalactic entity that would unite the broken civilizations of the Orion Arm and perhaps, the rest of the galaxy. Minerva had dismissed those sayings as rants of an overtaxed gamer, but for some reason, she felt that there were some things falling into place with the finding of this derelict colony in the middle of nowhere and the discovery of Mutsu along with her other ships.

* * *

"What time is it?", asked Mutsu weakly, her eyes full of confusion and worry.

"September 22, 2256, 0835, I just ended my watch", Jean responded with a tired tone, "winding down to sleep, but I guess it's time to take you over to the infirmary and show you around the ship, can you walk, your muscles felt kinda stiff when we put you in the bed."

"Ummm, they are kinda stiff, but I think that walking around would help out" Mutsu responded weakly.

So he held her hand and helped her up, and out they went, from the dark room into the bright corridor with a soft hiss, and off they went.

The corridor was a warm grey, had handrails and other amenities that normally would not be present in a warship, but as this was a patrol cruise, the commodore allowed things like rugs, posters, and other notes to other crewmembers. Doors down the hall denoted the slightly cramped junior officer's bunks, which were stacked a comfortable 2 to a bunk. They were all young, college age kids that came to the Officer's academy straight out of high school and were assigned to the ship right out of graduation, and because of that, the corridor looked more like a college dorm than military sleeping quarters. Jean sighed a sigh of relief when none of the officers came out of the doors to ask questions about the rather skimpily clad girl next to the Captain. The rounded a corner and approached a set of transparent doors. There was the infirmary.

"So here we are, back in the infirmary where we have all of you strange ones stored" Jean announced as the sliding doors to the infirmary hissed open to reveal a surgically clean room, which had beds along one side and had tubes along the back, like the one Mutsu came in, stacked neatly in columns and flashing dim LEDs at their control panels. Mutsu nervously stepped in, her rudder heels clicking lightly against the white linoleum.

Mutsu nervously asked, "But why did you bring me back here, weren't you supposed to show me around the ship, like people are supposed to when new people are taken aboard a ship?"

"Ahhh…. about that…well, Marie told me to bring you back here as soon as you woke so she could do a more thorough check-up on you, also , to see just how biological you are, because you look very life-like and did not show up on the bio-scanners, which don't detect Innovators anyways", he paused for a moment, "and make yourself at home, this isn't my office, but I find it funny to see Marie exasperated at the people that she would expect to like."

As if on cue, Marie walked in through the doors, which did not shut automatically because Jean had locked the OPEN button on the wall as he walked in.

She glaringly says, "I hope you haven't done anything to her, if you do, I have the right to kick you off this ship, even if you are the captain."

"Yea, yea", Jean says absentmindedly, "just get to it, you said that you needed to check her out before I could take her around."

"Yes Sir", Marie says curtly, "I want to make a check-up while she is conscious and not comatose, like some doctors would do".

She sat Mutsu down at one of the beds and then took out a thin syringe, she inserts it into the crook of her elbow to extract some blood first, after, taking a small tube's worth of blood from her arm and placing it in a blood analysis machine. She then takes a small headdress out form underneath the bed, hooks it up to the minimalist looking computer at the head of the bed and asks, "do you know if you are more biological or more machine, because i want to know from you before I do anything more".

Mutsu responds, "I am a Kanmusu, an artificial intelligence program that was implanted into a genetically modified embryo, not carbon based, but made of a substance known as "Bio-aluminum" which is an effective cell membrane material against the invaders of my country, the Abyssals, who at the time of my commissioning, had nearly conquered the entire planet and with that, We were sent into space to protect what was left of mankind, along with select personnel to reproduce and to continue Humanity's mark in the Universe", almost robotically, as if this response was a recording and less of an actual statement made by Mutsu. To complement this, while she was answering the question, Jean noticed that most of the life had left her eyes and her body stiffened up, much like a robot. At this, Marie deftly removes the cabling and stows it along with the helmet back underneath the bed.

"Ok, get up, both of you out" Marie barks, "I have stuff to do and things to analyze, Mutsu, I will get back to you after I'm done, I'll call you over the Intercom. Meanwhile you" she turns quickly around to face Jean, "show her around the ship to kill some time, go grab a breakfast or something, Shevonne made some of her famous croissants this morning 'cuz she's off duty today. Shoo, Shoo". Marie pushes them out the door together before slamming the CLOSE and LOCK buttons on the inside of the room.

"Well, so much for a medical check-up," Jean breaths out with a light chuckle, "why don't we head to the galley for some food, her sister does make great pastries".

"By any chance, was there another tube labeled with the name 'Murakumo'? That doctor, Marie, she looks similar to her"

"I don't know, I wasn't on the team that was in charge of extracting the cryotubes that you girls were in, but I think that Marie will let you examine who has what, because the nearest person that knows Japanese is several kilometers away in the light carrier" Jean responds with a smile, and as he turns to see Mutsu's smile, his head runs into a bulkhead, knocking not only his officer's cap, but also his whole self over. Seeing this, Mutsu, smiles a little and chuckles lightly before bending down to help him up.

"Being 6' 4" is not easy you know, especially in a smaller ship like this, that's why I hate being on the destroyers, they are way too cramped" Jean says slightly sourly as he gets up while rubbing his forehead. He grabs his officer's cap and jams it back on his head, but before he does, Mutsu notices that he has two small sprigs of hair that also face forward, much like the way her hairband antennae face.

Walking through the Mobile Suit Hanger as a shortcut to the galley, Jean suddenly stops Mutsu in the middle of one of the mid-level catwalks and swiftly points down at the center of the floor. There, a hemisphere has been made, like some sort of drop shield from Halo, as Jean would have put it. Inside there were two people, on their left, was the Commodore Herself, with her signature red uniform, while on the right, was another girl, with straw-grey hair, half of which was tied into long pigtails, by contrast, she was wearing a black uniform that denoted her as a junior officer. She had ochre eyes and a leering smile that made her look as if she was armed with fangs. next to her feet, was a little robotic ball that flapped it's diminutive wings and rolled in circles around her legs.

"Yo take a look," a sparring match is about to begin, Jean says rather enthusiastically, "People find it nice to have sparring contests once in a while, it helps to keep your senses sharp when out of combat and passes the time on long patrols with little to do".

As if on cue, a bright light engulfs each of the girls and when the bright lights die down, there they were, seemingly transformed from normal humans to super soldiers. Zabi had a beam assault rifle in her right arm, a rather large shield on her left that was armed to the teeth and had her family coat of arms emblazoned on it, and on her rear waist, there was mounted a sort of gearbox that had small wings with thrusters on the rear and two mysterious grey cylinders that hung off from the wings. Her small legs were now housed in large Red boots with gold and black knee plates. Also, they were literally covered with thrusters all along the rear. On the other side, the mysterious girl had donned a triple spiked shoulder mounted shield, arms encased in field green gauntlets, a small truster backpack that had a tomahawk mounted on it. Her suit included boots that looked simplistic, without the ornate designs and folds that were on Zabi's suit. Her robot had jumped up as it was engulfed by the light, it now was waist mounted, along an armored side skirt on her right side, on the opposite side of which held several cylindrical grenades, and finally, a very large sniper rifle cradled in her arms.

Mutsu gasped very loudly in surprise, which Jean had to turn around to look at to make sure that there was nothing wrong with her, aside from her hand flying at almost superhuman speed from the guardrail to over her mouth.

"I didn't know that you have Kanmusu as well," she gasps between surprised breaths, "I thought that they were a thing unique to Imperial Japan, we were supposed to be one of a kind!"

"I have no idea what you are talking about," Jean replies with a puzzled look, "they are wielding a weapon known as the Infantry Suit, or IS, like having the power of large mobile suits being compressed into one small package, although you do lose out on quite a bit of firepower due to scaling."

Mutsu calms down a little at the explanation. "Anyways," Jean continues, "most people, like Antionelle over there, have standard issue IS, while high officers, like Commodore Zabi, have them forged, each custom one is made based on an individual commander's personality and the synchronization possibility that a person has with it."

As they talk, they two ladies lunge at each other and draw their respective close combat weapons, Zabi, with a wrist stored beam saber and Antionelle, with the tomahawk from her jetpack. In a single stroke, with Zabi, on top, she uses her beam saber set to EMP mode, to stab it into her jetpack, which is the designated weak point for sparring matches, all before Antionelle could even begun to swipe at Zabi with the tomahawk. Their beam weapons stop emitting their green glow and in the same flash of light, they return to their normal selves. Minerva pulls Antionelle up by the arm and shakes her hand before the field dissipates and they walk away together in conversation.

Jean looked on with a "not bad" face, Mutsu meanwhile, still had a large puzzled look on her face as Jean leads them down a set of stairs to a large mess area. The area appears large, despite only being able to fit no more than 40 people at a time, with the higher ceiling and large windows in the back, offering a sweeping view of the gas clouds that make up the Orion Arm, and the bottom of the hull of the ship, if one were to look up through the windows. On the wall to the left of the windows, there are a set of pictures hanging, portraits of important crew members, Mutsu assumed, and one picture in particular caught her eye.

The person in the photo, had long sweeping lavender colored hair, his eyes seemed to be in a slight smirk, as if he were sneering at the low skill level of the other portraits around him, he had a rather deep skin color, almost a gold rather than the pale color that Jean had, and he was wearing, quite literally, the exact same uniform that Jean had on.

"Who's that?" Mutsu inquired, "Is he some well know person on the ship?" At that, Jean's eye suddenly drop and his tone goes from rather cheery to somber, as if he was mourning someone. "That's Derwent Zeon," he said slowly, "he was the executive officer of this fleet and the captain of this ship before I got this to command. He was also very close with commodore Zabi, from what I heard from the older crew members."

"Where is he now?" She asks, her interest piqued as they approach the photo and examine it.

"Well, long story short, he died, how?, we believed that he would fell into black hole Cygnus after his umbilical to the ship was severed." Jean said quietly, but as he said it, he noticed a small shimmer outside the window. Using the nearest comm panel, he calls the bridge with a small swish of his hands

"This is Captain to the Bridge, you guys have anything on the sensors?"

"No sir, not quite….Hold on there, I think that we do, radioman, confirm contacts!"

Jean could hear in the background "wait a minute... hey, what the, THEY'RE CHARGING WEAPONS".

Cursing himself for not being more suspicious of the glimmer and immediate hitting the emergency button, he opens the line to Intercom and yells:

ALL HANDS TO GENERAL QUARTERS, REPEAT, ALL HANDS TO GENERAL QUARTERS, WE ARE CONDITION RED, WE ARE CONDITION RED, THIS IS NO DRILL

He grabs Mutsu's hand and says, "well, looks like our little tour was cut short, let's head to the bridge". As they tear back across the mess hall and back to the hangar to see the whole place beginning to erupt into chaos as pilots began to board Mobile Suits, engineers ran around with last minute check-ups and small robots doing the finishing maintenance work. Klaxons rang all around them as the two of them ran down the corridor that they came down in to get to the elevator, which Jean forces open with his Captain's keycard and pulls Mutsu in, He then presses the button for the bridge as the doors hissed closed.

Inside the small elevator, Jean notices as Mutsu's eye began to glow slightly, around the irises and her surprised face slowly goes from puzzled to cool and collected, she opens up and says "Captain, there are Abyssals in Close proximity, please be advised" before snapping back to attention. Meanwhile, Jean's irises began to develop streaks of dull yellow, much like a firework went out in the middle of his eye and the sparks were radiating out from his pupils, as he began to establish a telepathic link with Minerva. Through that link, they are able to share limited amounts of thoughts and images of what the other is seeing to help with coordination.

As Jean and Mutsu exit the elevator and enter the bridge, The radioman says "Sir, the bogeys are hailing us through an open channel, all other ships on channel ready to receive transmission."

"OK, put'em through, Corporal"

A cold face emerged on the viewscreen, it coldly and methodically stated, "You are in violation of the Territory of the Abyssal Fleet, you are to disarm your weapons and power down your defenses. Prepare to be integrated within the fleet or be annihilated."

The person behind the screen appeared to have prosthetic legs, a scepter, and a weird looking headdress that looked curiously like a parasite, with small cannons pointing out from the side and the head of the headdress billowing some sort of blue glowing smoke. It had a large toothed mouth on the front and it seemed to be lifeless, except that it wasn't.

What sent chills down the crews' spines wasn't the cold and nearly robotic voice, it wasn't the strange way the person or thing dressed, and it wasn't even the fact that the person appeared to be standing in the vacuum of space without any sort of life support or space suit.

…

…

.

.

.

.

.

.

It was because the face, was the face of Derwent Zeon.


	3. Escape and Questions

A/N: So This is the first battle scene that I have ever written, so please feel free to give me pointers in the reviews and from now on, if there is exposition that I cannot fit into the dialogue within the story, I will put it in the beginning as some sort of textbook entry or diary entry

* * *

Mobile Suits: large humanoid walkers, about 60 feet tall, generally faster and more maneuverable than tanks or fighters. Generally preferred over starfighters in space because of their lower power consumption, despite their larger size and large engineering requirements, then have a very low running cost combined with the capability to do other tasks other than combat make them ideal to any military force.

Infantry Suits (IS): Small armaments that are mounted on a person's body to enhance combat capability They are compressible into small objects with the use of a microscopic quantum IS core. Although there are standard assigned models, many commanders and ace pilots/special forces squadrons are given custom models, which are generated based on your personality traits, different people will have different sorts of IS properties

Konisch Rounds: Projectile rounds fired from ships that use the round's physical shell to punch through beam defenses and then the beam contents to melt and penetrate armor, extremely difficult to manufacture so ships and only capital ships typically carry them, and then, they carry no more than 5-10 salvos' worth

_Textbook of Engineering for High School Freshmen, January 2231 edition_

* * *

Everybody on the ship froze, all riveted to the nearest view screen.

"Oh cock", Jean moans as he pushes Mutsu into the First Officer's seat and straps himself into the Captain's chair, "All force mobile suits prepare to launch, repeat, all mobile suits prepare to launch" he says coolly into the microphone.

He then telepathically calls out to Zabi, who is in the Command and Control Center several floors below. in the hull of the ship.

_Any plans, Ma'am?_

_No, charge main cannons, fire flares, missiles, anything, whatever you do, do not launch the mobile suits, we need to protect the destroyer crewmen in the colony and hightail it out of here_

_Mark coordinates and we need to get out of here, look at the size of those radar signatures, we are one battleship, one light carrier, and seven destroyers, there is no way in Hell we will be able to hold this line against two carriers and 3 battleships._

_Yes ma'am, orders acknowledged. will have- _

The radioman's cry of distress brings Jean back from his mindscape back to the bridge.

"ETA in 3 minutes, Captain, what are your orders?" he nervously asks, his eyes full of worry. His hands were visibly shaking and unsteady.

"Keep Mobile suits on standby, charge, are the destroyers ready for warp jump?"

"Sorry Sir, we got caught with our pants down and there are still crewmen from the destroyers in the colony searching for more artifacts."

"Patch me through to them"

"Yes Sir"

"_Crew on colony, status report"_

"_Sir, we broke into what seems to be the head person's office, the person's body is actually still floating in the vacuum. We have retrieved some notebooks and taken the documents onboard the _Alpine Ridge_, we are awaiting extraction."_

"_Hold out until then, you will have 5 minutes"_

Facepalming at the complication that the destroyers are not ready for warp and that a major fleet is about to annihilate the task force, Jean looks up at the view screen and says as calmly as possible: "Power up CIWS and load konisch rounds in main guns and charge particle capacitors, load Sledgehammer antiship missiles in tubes 5 through 10 and Scimitar anti air missiles in all other tubes."

He turns back to the radioman, "How long will it take and how far can the destroyers jump?"

With that, he turns to Mutsu, who has been staring out the view port with alot of worry.

"Mutsu, I need you to tell me all you know about the 'Abyssal Fleet' from your world, it may save, the task force today, Minerva is listening too," Jean said quickly, the telepathic glow in his eyes intensifying as he said it.

"Judging by the shape of the incoming ships, there are two Wo-class carriers and 3 Ta-class fast battleships," Mutsu said quickly, "but that is only my judgement based on what has been preloaded into my brain and the shape of the incoming ships. The person standing on top of the trailing full size Wo-class carrier is the real Wo-class carrier".

At this moment, the radio crackles to life with the voice of the captain of the destroyer _Alpine Ridge._

"_This is Lieutenant Sheryl, we have all of the personnel aboard, but we along with the other destroyers will only be able to jump 4 light-years at the most, even then, we may damage the warp drives as the maintenance teams were unable to properly align the warp coils."_

At this, Maxim directs the destroyer captains back to Minerva, who is the commodore and should be conducting force coordination instead of him. He then turns back to Mutsu:

"What kind of capabilities does the Abyssal fleet have?"

"They are capable of converting people into ships, and they are also capable of absorbing knowledge of people and things that come with the people"

"well that explains why the Abyssal fleet is in space, were they in space when your colony left your Earth?"

"No, they were completely based in the ocean, the came from there and destroyed pretty much the whole world, that's why we left, to preserve what was left of the human population"

At this, the targeting computer flashes green as the abyssal ships enter range of the main battery. The fire director works quickly directing the gunners in the turrets to target the lead Wo-class carrier as it opens its maw, revealing hundreds of little white balls inside.

"Well shit, we got to deal with fighters too, how much longer until the warp drives are ready for emergency jump on the destroyers?" Jean takes a look at the time, well, at least we only have to hold them off for a couple minutes. He turns back to the viewport and firmly says, "Main cannons fire away"

Outside the ship, the three double 14-inch dual ammo turrets light up and begin final preparations and adjustments, and then, six bright flashes of electrical energy as the shells are electromagnetically accelerated to nearly a tenth of the speed of light and a moment later, six spectacular explosions as the eyes on the lead ship are shattered by the sheer force of six 2-ton shells slam into eyes, releasing what appears to be more glowing blue gas.

The secondary Explosions were even more spectacular, as the whole ship seemed to rip itself apart in a brilliant blue ball of fire, with collateral damage knocking the opposite flanking battleships out of line, but before the explosions happened, the small white balls took off from the mouth, almost like bats taking off from a cave. Their eyes were glowing a sort of satanic fire red and a third of them carried a machine gun in a pod underneath their smiling teeth, another third carried a mysterious tube underneath their bodies, and the last third carried a bomb.

Then the six guns of the _Gunter Lutjens_ flash again, but this time, instead of an electrical discharge following the guns there is one long pink beam that is projected from the barrels, but instead of the brilliant flash, the beam hits some invisible barrier in front of the abyssal Battleship and splits into several smaller beams and they arced around the battleship before joining back up as open beam aft of the battleship. Simultaneously, the destroyers and _Gunther Lutjens_ launch a large amount of antiship and anti air missiles. Many of the missiles run into the large group of fighters and the fragmentation detonations of the Helldarts cuts huge swaths of destruction into the spherical fighters, but they were still coming, next, the small 5-inch guns of the destroyers and finally, the gatling guns of the ship's CIWS start cutting down the fighters one by one, but it is not enough, the small fighters, no larger than 5 feet in diameter kept dropping bombs at the destroyers, but thanks to their laminated armor and physically-impervious phase shift armor, the destroyers weather the barrage nicely.

After 5 minutes, the destroyers signal that they are ready for jump. Maxim orders: "All destroyers slave jump calculators to us, we're booking it!"

"_YES SIR,"_ they scream in unity

"_Jump controls to you, my commander" _Jean projects to Minerva.

At that instant, 7 ships simply vanish in a puff of smoke and a short trail of green glittering powder pointing the way that the ships went.

"What the hell was that, Zeon in their hands friggin' explains how their technology matches ours, it took Konisch rounds, something invented after he was gone to defeat the ships, we only have 4-5 salvos left after that, and I was pretty sure that those more heavily armored battleships had something else up their sleeve than beam countermeasures"

"The Abyssal fleet had enslaved the majority of the human population and had begun conversion of most of them into smaller ship classes and the ones deemed more intelligent into flagship classes."

Jean sighs as he turns on the ship PA: "All personnel, we are downgrading condition to yellow, off duty crew may return to activities, all crew are to remain on high alert"

Unbuckling herself and standing up, Mutsu, looks at Jean with eyes of curiosity, wondering what could finding her have done to them. Jean looks back at her, his eye full of worry at what they may have brought on to the people of Solar, their home system and the first iteration of Earth to go interstellar. She notices that the dull yellow glow has left his eyes and that they have returned to their normal lime green. as he straightens out his uniform, he beckons to Mutsu to follow him/

"Well then, that was rather hairy, why don't we go back to the galley, like we were supposed to, i still need to grab my breakfast," Jean grumbles, "and maybe they can send us some copies of the notebooks they found in the office so we could analyze them"

* * *

They found themselves sitting across from Minerva in the ready room 10 minutes later and a steaming hot breakfast in front of them as they began pouring over the documents of the notebooks on the tabletop screen, examining them for any sort of clue as to the origin and the purpose of the abyssal fleet.

Minerva suddenly stops reading and stares at the screen, her eyes growing wide with concern.

"Abyssal Admiral: Jacques de le Cuzel, does that sound familiar to you, Maxim?"

"Wasn't he the guy who was responsible for 3 colony drops on the earth back in 2017 and basically wrecked Europe, Russia, and Japan, hence, why we are all on separate planets within the same solar system. He also was responsible for the development of the original IS that we still currently use and was the head of mysterious human experiment projects, often including cloning, so I actually would not be super surprised to find out that I have more than some passing genetic relation to Mutsu, but what the hell was he doing in some undeveloped world?"

"With all due respect commodore," Mutsu pipes up, "Jaques was one of the heads that directed the team that constructed us. I was unaware that he was an admiral of our enemy, they did not appear until after he mysteriously died in a plane crash after the first 5 kanmusu were constructed, part of the 188 fleet directive."

"What you don't know is that, according to this, he was the one that constructed the original abyssal fleet as well," Minerva responds shortly, "how he did it, we have no idea".

"Another issue is what was he doing on your planet in the first place? He was born on our planet and he should have died several years before the invention of FTL travel, there are people still alive that witnessed the event, of the execution of the world's most heinous warmonger by beheading, for stirring civil war within the old United Nations and mass genocide." Jean responds in a textbook manner.

"Whatever, aside from details of exactly how you guys were made and stuff, these notebooks have done nothing other than confuse the heck out of us even more," Minerva says flatly.

"Actually, Mutsu," Minerva says, "you say that you are a so-called 'ship girl', can you show us what your ship armaments are and what kind of capabilities they have? Not here, of course, back in the medbay, it is reinforced relative to the rest of the ship and has a high enough ceiling while being private enough for the rest of the ship to show anything that needs to be hidden from prying eyes."

They all stand up and simultaneously leave the room for the infirmary.

* * *

"Well then," Jean breaths, "your arms seem to be deployed the same way as ours, but damn, they look very graceful, you got four twin 16-inch turrets, if memory serves right"

"Yea, it is, but due to limitations of the source code input into my brain, it seems that I cannot move beyond a slow walk with my ship arms deployed, but I believe that my ship's guns are actually larger than your ship's main battery, i believe that I would be of some use to this ship as a turret in battles at least"

"Would be a nice addition if we were in an atmosphere, where we could actually test it out, but for now, I think that our best bet would be to make a beeline back to Mars and report this personally to the Empress, I have the ability to meet with her at most of her free times, plus, I know her personally, which would be a huge help, and she also knew Jacques from her time as a supersoldier candidate before the Lylat Wars."

Jean, looking rather doubtful, responds, "and why don't you take this to Admiral Zeon, he is the head of our fleet anyways, he would know what to-"

"Do you think that some idiot admiral would simply give his own little brother a suicide mission to attempt and simply ignore his death? I for one would like to see Gunther removed from the Admiralty," Minerva seethes, tears of anger beginning to form in her eyes, "why, why did they have to bring him back like that?!"

She loses control and cries hard grabbing Jean's shoulders and digging her face into his chest.

The small task force of ships continues to make their way back to Mars, the light years whizzing by and the crew full of uncertainty at the future prospects of survival. Minerva cried on Jean's shoulder for several minutes before realizing that she was crying in front of a junior officer. With that, she ran back to her room and stayed there, she did not come back out for the rest of the day.


	4. Home

IS Compression: with the Advent of innovators, one strange thing that scientists found was that IS pilots could compress their whole IS unit into a tiny object. The compression and decompression process is of limited use on the battlefield however, the compression and decompression is always couple with a bright flash of light.

Tankery: A new sport that came with the introduction of physically impervious phase shift armor. It is a sport that has high school students driving tanks and armored vehicles against each other, vying for dominance on a set battlefield. All tanks that are used must have been either fielded or have been in the full prototype stage by the end of July 1945. This competition is held internationally at different planets each year. Has become nearly synonymous with high school football in the twentieth century.

-_Makings of the Modern World_, a textbook for primary school history

* * *

October 1, 2256

Port time: 0900

Location: Ground Station, Canterbury Starbase, Mars. Martian Empire

"Well, finally back at port for a couple weeks of leave," Jean says tiredly while stretching. He is in the officer's lounge in the base and for the first time in three months at this time of the day. In the intervening time, the preliminary test results from Marie showed that Mutsu was indeed closely related to him, except that she was a girl, they were about as related as a set of fraternal twins, genetically speaking.

They were scheduled to go to the labs to activate the rest of the tubes and to wake up the rest of the girls in the tubes in a couple days. Meanwhile, most of the crew were going back to their families to visit, including Jean, who lived a short 20 minute drive away from the starbase.

"I guess you don't really have anywhere to go, Mutsu, so why don't you come to my place, my shut-in of a sister needs some outside contact with other people every now and then. She's a great leader, but damn, she sucks at being social, I wonder how she even became the captain of the Tankery team at school."

As he is saying this, Jean grabs a small duffel bag and heads out the door, grabbing the keys of a nearby Jeep that is reserved for Officer's near the sliding door of the lounge. Thankfully, the lounge was empty except the officers from the ship, so that Mutsu was spared the lustful looks of some of the not-so-morally straight officers of some of the ground bases.

Outside, the sky was a bright bronze color, and it was lighting up rather quickly, one of the only real downsides of living on the Martian surface, you had to deal with the daytime sky being constantly red to orange, depending on the weather, and to see fully blue skies, one had to go back to Earth or some other planet in Human territory that had a surface made primarily of water. Mars was mostly desert and only had a small strip of lush green habitat around the equator, where most of the surface liquid water was located.

Despite it being near a small town of Hamptonshire, the road to Jean's house was rather wide open, bypassing the town and going into the small suburbs where most of the people lived. The suburbs were rather old, but not old looking. I you were to look carefully, you would see that every house had one of three base designs, but people had modified their houses so much over the years that the houses looked simply thrown together, rather than being built by one contractor. After driving through the surprisingly winding roads of the suburb, they pull over in front of an old fashioned house, with tall vaulted ceilings that seemed out of place in the cool desert and appeared to belong rather in the Alps of Europe. The windows were large and open, covered only by simply designed curtains waving in the light, warm, breeze. They got out of the car and Jean notices Mutsu, saying:

"We had also better gotten you new clothes, maybe a uniform or something, we can't have you walking around in that all the time, it seems rather… too liberal in revealing skin."

"Well, this was the uniform I was assigned with when I was commissioned," Mutsu responds with a roll of her eyes, "you can modify it mow, as my Admiral is now dead and you and Commodore Zabi are basically my commanding officers now."

"Then we must quickly change your 'uniform', 'cuz you're gonna have a hard time walking around public areas dressed like that," Jean says as they walk up the driveway to the front door.

And Jean was right, Mutsu was basically dressed in a sports bra, her breasts spilling out the chestplate underneath it, all of her midriff fully exposed and she was wearing a very short skirt, only extending several inches into her thigh and barely covering her hips.

Approaching the door, instead of using the house key that Jean pulled out of his pocket, he rings the doorbell. The doorbell rings out with a single loud DOOOOOONNNNNNNNNGGGG, amplified greatly by the vaulted and angled ceilings. He rings the doorbell four times before they hear locks unlocking and the door swings inward away from them almost too quickly.

"Well Shit, Look Who's Home", The a harsh voice greets them, each word enunciated sharply and clearly as possible, with a hint of sarcasm.

"You had keys and yet you're still ringing the doorbell for style points, BUT YOU HAVE NONE HERE!" she ends, seeming even angrier.

The voice belonged to a rather tall girl,at five foot seven. She had long, glossy, flowing, waist-length black hair held together by a grey hairband. There was one clump of her bangs that met somewhere between her abrasive, almond shaped brown eyes, locked into a near perpetual frown. She was wearing a dull, plain pink hoodie with sleeves rolled up to her elbows and short daisy dukes on her legs that accentuated their length and slenderness.

"Hello again, Nancy," Jean replied with a small smirk, "you seem rather grumpy today, why so angry?"

"You friggin' woke me up from my sleep, I had a long game session with the crew last night, and anyways, who's that?" she said as she motioned towards Mutsu, "I didn't know I had an older sister and why the hell is she dressed like that?" She finally stepped aside to admit her brother and Mutsu into the house.

The house was very cozy on the inside, despite appearing very large on the outside. The living room was covered with bamboo flooring and had five narrow windows on the right side that got taller with the building ceiling, appearing like the "raising the bar" logos from Cellular mobile from the early 21st century. Beyond the stairwell was the kitchen, with three bullet lights hung over a bar style counter. Jean dropped his bag and reached into the small drink fridge below the table. He pulled out a small pitcher of sugarcane juice and three cups.

"Ah, mom can always be relied upon to actually have a good supply of sugarcane juice at any given time of the year,"he said as he took a swig from his glass and slid the other two to Mutsu and nancy, who were sitting across the table from him.

"It's quite a house you have, much larger than that little box that you call home on the ship," Mutsu says.

"You kidding me? that 'box' of yours is the Captain's quarters, I'll throw you into the enlisted bunks if you want to complain about that room being small," Jean fumes.

"So bro," Nancy pipes up, "What kind of misadventures have you been in to find her?" She gestures to Mutsu, "she looks almost exactly like you."

"Sorry Nancy, classified information until further notice," Jean says flatly, "but could you lend her some clothes for the next couple of days? Don't want people to think that she is some sort of slut when she isn't."

"Follow me then, I guess I'll show you around the house while I'm at it."

They go up the stairs and at the landing, there is a short hallway, with four doors. Nancy opens the first one to the left, admitting Mutsu and herself into a small, dark room, but when Nancy flips the light switch on, a whole assortment of anime and manga memorabilia come into view. Posters of great anime from the present and the past line the walls, there are several shelves stuffed chock full of anime figurines, and in the open closet door, lots and lots of cosplay equipment and clothing. from the depths of the walk-in closet, Nancy pulls out a long white turtleneck with thin black stripes and a pair of tight black jeans.

"Here, take it, and make sure you give it back, it's one of the few things that I actually have that aren't my school uniform," Nancy said as she closed the door to her room after shutting down the light.

"You look alot like my sister you know, and have some of the same personality traits as well," Mutsu said to Nancy as they started going back down the stairs.

"Hmmm, I hope your older sister is a great person, like my brother, honestly, we go through the angry at each other thing for the sake of old times, back when I was ten and didn't know any better and he was starting high school. We were like Shiro and Sora from that one anime, No Game No Life from so long ago."

"You are like my sister, maybe someday she can meet you," Mutsu purrs.

As they go back down the stairs, Jean suddenly asks them, "Hey, where's Mom and Dad? Mom's usually home at this time of day from the office."

"They are out on the colonies for a retreat Mom's company put on, they said that I would be fine, you constantly forget that I'm not five years old anymore. I'm seventeen for cryin' out loud," Nancy says with a pout, "you know what? let me go to the mall with you to pick some clothes, and then you two will help me out at the Tankery practice after, former team captain", she placed much emphasis on the word "former".

Two hours later, they were at the town mall, having planned out some ways of purchasing clothing for Mutsu. It was rather hard to find clothes for Mutsu, given the fact that she was tall for a girls and still had a slender figure. In the end, Nancy helped Mutsu to find several sets of assorted T-shirts, jackets, pants, normal shoes (you know, walking around with ship rudder heels all the time is not exactly comfortable), and slightly longer skirts (thankfully, than the one she had been wearing).

After, they went to the Jean and Nancy's high school to begin Tankery practice. Several years earlier, Jean had lead the Hamptonshire Secondary school to victory at the Grand Finals against the defending champions of the cup. That actually was what landed Jean into the Officer's academy and into his first post as Captain of the ship upon graduation.

The school was located at the edge of town. Out away from the primary complex of buildings that made up the classrooms, offices, and the gym, was a single large hangar, It was tall and had a slightly rusted exterior, with the green paint flaking away. most of the windows were turned to the open position to allow air to circulate, lest the inside become musty under the constant blazing Martian sun. It honestly looked more like a sweatshop factory than the hangar of the defending champions of the Tankery tournament.

Inside was a different story though, as Nancy unlocked the double sliding doors and use d the mechanical gate controller to open the doors, the inside was clean and neat, with only ten tanks in a neat line, one tiger tank, two panthers, one centurion 17 pounder, three cromwell late models, and three Churchill black princes, also with the 17 pounder. The hangar interior was neat with equipment boxes to left, and a large ammunition locker to the right side, storing large amounts of 75 and 85 millimeter armor-piercing ammunition.

"Hm, you certainly have made it much neater since I have left," Jean whistles, "and you also acquired several more tanks than what I had in my time."

Too bad the crews weren't as good as they were in your time," Nancy responds in a dull tone, "and oh yea, when you take Mutsu up to the colony starport later, could you take me too?"

Jean, who was inspecting the Tiger, which was not there in his day, suddenly stops, and turns around with a face of surprise, "How did you find out about that, that was highly encrypted classified information."

"I have my ways," Nancy responds with a smirk and a little twinkle in her eye, "but you should take me, I know about as much about them as you do, like how Mutsu is almost a clone of you."

"Well, knowing that I have no real choice but to take you, you little hacking scumbag," Jean throws back at her before turning to Mutsu, "and let me show you around the inside of the tanks, they are quite interesting."

The inside of the tank was filled with pipes, levers, and a great myriad of pipes and other gear such as scopes, flares, and integral ammo racks at the bottom of the tank. The commander had a seat. with the gun sticking between where the legs would be. the gunner was on the right side of the tank and was denoted by a shoulder mount that was synced with the main gun and the coaxial gun by a series of gears. Under the gunner's feet, were two foot pedals that when pressed, allowed the gunner to turn the turret at his discretion.

He pulled Mutsu out of the tank eventually though, because Nancy wouldn't allow him to take the Tiger out and allow Mutsu to fire the Long 88 rifle. The Practice commenced, with being a skirmish that day, a 5 on 5, Jean and Mutsu stood watch over the battle in a nearby control tower for the team, Nancy's team barely won, when their last cromwell lobbed a shot over a sand dune and knocked out the opposing panther.

* * *

Several hours later, after they had gone home, had a hearty dinner, and changed into their uniforms (Jean in his officer's uniform, Mutsu into her 'battle dress', and Nancy into her school uniform). Jean uses the jeep to drive them back to the base and to pick up a transport ship and head out to the colonies, where Jean, Mutsu, Marie, and Minerva are scheduled to open the rest of the tubes and to Hopefully find out more about the ship girls.

As they climb out of the atmosphere in a small ferry-like transport, the sky slowly turns from the deep orange color of the Martian late afternoon to the jet black of space. They climb slowly, up past the turbulence and the air into the void of space. They dodge a large public ferry as they continue to make their way to a military base on the Military colony of Phobos, which, as a resource colony, has eaten up much of the asteroid. As they land in the voluminous starport, they notice that not only has the whole task force been berthed there, but also several other ships, notably two small destroyers that Jean recognizes as from Earth and Zimmerit respectively.

As he docks his small transport in one of the small berths and extends the airlock.

"Well, we're here, let's see what we have in store for us today," Jean says quietly to himself as he gets off the pilot's seat and walks into the long hallway that is the berthing terminal. He turns right to go into the base itself. The hallway, which was long, filled with the kind of fluorescent lights that you would find in a hospital.

they walked for a while before they came to the lobby, a large rectangular room with many chairs arranged in neat rows, like an airport and terminals going in different directions. The lobby was unusually empty, made only more obvious by the long rows of empty chairs. Jean had been here before, when he was first assigned to the _Gunther_ _Lutjens_, and remembered that the place was crowded, people walking in and out of the terminals as ships were docking and departing all at once, but now, the lobby was hauntingly empty, sitting in the back near the exit, with a novel in her hands and her characteristic blood red uniform, was Minerva Zabi.

As they approach her, she suddenly puts her book down and looks up.

"You're late," she say simply.

"We're here an hour early, what do you mean we're late?" Jean responds, his face turning to a confounded look.

"All the people are already here, so last one to arrive is late, and who said you could bring your sister?" Minerva snaps at him.

"She hacked into our transmissions apparently, she was able to decrypt them and consequently found out about the Ship girls."

Minerva lets out a sigh, "whatever," she says simply, "not my fault if you are drafted into the military on the spot when the authorities find out. Follow me"

As they go through the empty halls of the enormous base, Jean notices that the bse is absolutely devoid of people, It was worrying, because Phobos was one of the largest bases in Mars, but instead of asking questions, he chose to keep his mouth shut and trudge on with Minerva. As they round a corner, they see the first people in the base. Two of them are wearing uniforms of the Earth Military, The boy, looked no older than Jean, but his hair was matte black and straight until it curled towards the ends. His eyes were a piercing and deep purple, his Uniform was simple, with no medals pinned on it, it was white with blue accents, and bright golden colored buttons running down the middle. He wore black rimmed glasses that were grey around the sides. There was a camo green beret sitting on his head. what caught Jean's attention was that the person's lapel held five stars, denoting him as the grand admiral of the Earth.

Next to him, was a girl with sky blue, knee-length hair tied into two pigtails, held up by two squares that curiously were not touching any part of her hair. She had soft, almond shaped eyes that were an aqua blue to match her hair. Her uniform was similar to the boy's but it was sleeveless, Black arm warmers with teal trim, and a black pleated miniskirt that also had teal trim. She was wearing a very telltale Captain's insignia on her shoulder lapels

By comparison, the other boy was alone. He had deep brown hair in a bowl cut, an unusually circular face for someone who was not overweight, and was a head shorter than the other boy, His eyes were rather small, but had a slightly lighter shade of brown than his hair. He wore a full black uniform, basically the naval officer uniform of the japanese navy. A belt ran across the short trenchcoat and white buttons ran down one side of his chest. On his head was a Naval Officer's cap, complete with the sakura flower medallion sitting in the middle of the cap, where the Iron cross would sit on a Martian cap.

Last person in the hall was wearing the same blood red uniform as Minerva, but she looked no older than 14, with small inconspicuous hair clips and bobby pins that held her hair out of her face. Her face was the shape of an upside down teardrop, her thin eyebrows and slight features made her seem like a doll. That was the empress of Mars.

Jean, Nancy, and Minerva simultaneously snap into a sharp salute, and Mutsu follows, after a second of confusion.

"Your Highness!" the three of them, sans Mutsu, say loudly.

"Shhhh, don't address me like that here, these guys are old friends of mine, it's fine here, you can be at ease and permission to speak freely" she responds quickly with a slightly embarrassed look, "You must be Jean, Nancy, and Mutsu, I have heard much about two of you anyways, especially with catapulting your school to fame with the tankery competitions."

"Thank you my empress," they respond with a bow.

"Now, I haven't introduced these people to you yet. This is Asano Konata, Admiral of Zimmerit's Reconnaissance fleets," she said while gesturing towards the man in the black uniform.

"This is Richard Lanoe, he is the head of the Earth navy, and his 'sister' Phoenix, she is a person who was born of experiments similar to the ship girls"

"Gentlemen," she continues, with a little sarcasm in the word that leaves in the next sentence, "This is Captain Maxim of HMS _Gunther Lutjens_, and the first ship-girl that we were able to awaken, Mutsu."

She stops at introducing Nancy, whom she does not know very well, or at all for that matter. But she gestures towards the door behind her, "We need you, Minerva, and Mutsu inside soon, before the rest of them wake up. It should help the confusion. You, there," she said pointing at Nancy, "you go with them. one of those ship girls looks enough like you to be your twin, although she looks to be Jean's age instead."

The sliding door opened, revealing a hospital ward-like interior with beds lined in both directions. In the corner, Marie was sitting, furiously typing away at a computer. Behind her, sat a girl that looked exactly like her, except that she was wearing a one-piece sailor uniform and had black pantyhose instead of a lab coat, orange turtleneck, and tight skirt.

There were a myriad of other girls that were lying comatose on the beds. Mutsu walked up to one and sat on the edge of the bed. The person on the bed looked like Nancy, except much more regal and proper, even though they could only see the face, it was quite obvious, on the foot of the bed, there was a placard that said "Battleship Nagato" to denote who she was and the class of ship she was in.

"They should start to wake up eventually, Captain, I managed to defrost them after awhile playing with the controls of those cryotubes," Marie shouts from the computer.

They were indeed starting to stir. The first one to pop up was one of the destroyers, Shimakaze. She didn't just wake up, she popped out of bed and ran over to Amatsukaze's bed to look at her, almost completely ignoring the four other people gathered around Nagato's bed. she summoned three robot looking things that had twin 5-inch rifles on top of the heads with a :3 plastered on their face. Shimakaze looked around after several minutes and locked her eyes on Mutsu, Jean, and Nancy.

"Who are you guys, and why are were here?" she said rather aggressively, the gun turret pointing towards Jean in particular.

"Umm, that, uhhh, ill tell you later, but first, why are you dressed like that?" Jean responds awkwardly.

It was true, Shimakaze was dressed in a sleeveless sailor uniform with a thong and a tiny miniskirt that made Mutsu's miniskirt look like it was worn by a conservative. With that, Shimakaze really had no response for Jean. He walked over to her and sat on the bed next to her.

"You are in a Martian starbase, I am Captain Jean Maxim, and I was the one who found all of you," Jean slowly said to Shimakaze, who nodded slowly, before jumping up out of Amatsukaze's bed and walking over to Mutsu, inspecting her for any defects before turning to Jean and asking:

"Where is Admiral Shinatose?" She asks with an exasperated look.

"Well, I tell you when everyone else wakes up, I don't want to explain it more times than I need to," Jean says with a sheepish look, "I'd rather get it all done at once."

He tried to eye Shimakaze over again without looking like he was trying to check her out. upon closer inspection. He saw that Shimakaze looked like a miniature Shevonne, with hair that was only tied up with a small hairband that stood up like two bunny ears. The more he looked at Shimakaze the more he thought that….

"We need to get you new clothes first," Nancy blurts out. Exactly what Jean was thinking.

As this is going on, all the other ship girls begin to stir. As their eyes open and their bodies start to get underway, they look around in confusion at first, and then in relief as they see their "ship sisters" around them. They all look as if there was some sort of disaster, and they are seeing their families once more. Jean begins to take a close look at each one and tally up their appearances and memorize their names.

"Sir, are you the admiral?" the one named Nagato asks, "Have you a need for the Combined fleet to defend the people from the Abyssals?"


	5. Sea Trials

Innovator Class: Although distinction is not made in normally made in normal everyday life, there are three classes of Innovator, all of them exhibit complete biological immortality and some sort of psychic abilities. Class C innovators show some level of precognition, combined with increased situational awareness. They have a limited ability to project their emotions. Class B innovators have increased precognitive abilities and have a fully developed ability to telepathically communicate with other Class B and Class A innovators. Class A innovators are extremely rare, the full extent their abilities are still unknown. In addition to all the abilities of the Class B and Class C innovators, they are capable of learning computer programs by simply reading code and memorizing it. They have been known to have telekinesis, some being able to influence phenomena throughout the universe, and are capable of hacking into programs and other secure material at close proximity, given that it is digital. Their cognitive analysis abilities are as powerful as ten normal humans working together, making them significant tactical and strategic assets. Class A innovators are identified by their scleras turning black and their irises turning blood red in one or both eyes. Their extra abilities do not manifest until an extreme life or death situation. Possibly many Class A innovators as civilians that are not aware of their abilities.

Logbook of Earth Naval Intelligence Services Commander, known as "Steel Angel"

* * *

Zuikaku couldn't stand it. I was only 0600 at the time and she was literally the only one awake in the room. she quietly got out of bed and went out the door to go to the restroom. she found it quite frustrating that her sister, Shoukaku was not rescued with the rest of the fleet, and that she was the one that was rescued instead.

She felt cheated.

On her way to the restroom down the hall, she passed by an open door that led to a small recreation room. Inside, it was a well-lit, green plastered room with some couches to the left side and a bookcase stocked with novels and magazines, a medium sized projector screen sat on the wall opposite of the door and a projector was positioned over the center of the room. In the middle of the room, there was a pool table, and it had a single person sitting on it with her back to Zuikaku. The person in question was wearing the same officer's uniform that "Admiral Konata" from the night before. She had long, flowing white hair, and a medium thickness red headband running through the top of her hair. The long pole she was holding was around her back, as she leaned backwards over the table to hit the cue ball, which was in an awkward position, to sink the black 8 ball. The thin figure expertly snapped the thin cue ball and had it reverse its direction as the cue ball tapped the 8 ball several inches into the corner hole.

The figure turned back around, revealing her face. She had large, warm yellow eyes, thin eyebrows, and relatively pale skin. Her lips curled into a soft smile as she looked up and noticed Zuikaku.

"Good morning, who might you be?" she says to Zuikaku in Japanese, her voice radiating with gentle warmth.

Taken aback for a moment, Zuikaku has a double take, it was Shoukaku. Zuikaku was unsure of what to do.

"Shoukaku-neesan?, I thought you were not rescued with the rest of the fleet? They lied to me right?" Zuikaku blurts out, naturally responding in Japanese.

The other person's face suddenly turns to one of confusion, seeming to have trouble recognizing the exact words that Zuikaku just said.

"I don't know of a person named Shoukaku, but that is the name of my command flagship, Fleet Carrier Shoukaku of the Fifth Reconnaissance Fleet." She responds softly, her voice welcoming and soft, "I read the reports before I came here this morning, I wasn't given photos of you girls, but I can guess that you are Zuikaku, are you not?"

Zuikaku stares back in disbelief, the person in front of her was Shoukaku, her ship sister, but why does she not know her? They were always together, until the Battle of the Philippine Sea.

"Oh, I'm Shiina Unryuu, nice to meet you," the girl says as she reaches under the table to retrieve an officer's cap. It is made of black cloth, with a single gold sakura flower on the middle of the cap. "I'll further introduce myself at the meeting after breakfast," she said with a small tip of her cap as she walked out of the door and down the corridor.

* * *

"And why are you now just enlisting yourself as an officer on the ship? Don't you have school to finish? And what about mom, she was already worried enough about me joining the military, she would go crazy if she found out that you just enlisted yourself in the military too," Jean shouted over his shoulders to Nancy, who was dressed in a black and grey junior officer's uniform and an ensign's emblem on her arm.

"It's fine, we have another couple of months of break before school resumes, if not, I could always attend class via webcam or have my homework emailed back to the school with the Warp Net."

"Don't dodge the question, you know why Mom doesn't want you to join the military, not after she found out what happened to people that were captured, they were basically reduced to animals after their return to home."

As this is happening, Mutsu, who had spent the night at Jean's house, looks back and forth and simply smiles at the exchange.

What really happened the previous night was that Nancy was handed a draft order, an officer's commision, and a uniform personally by the empress as soon as she left the room full of the ship girls…..to her delight and to Jean's chagrin.

Mutsu turned to Jean, "You know, why are you so angry with her joining the Navy? She seems quite enthusiastic," she said with a puzzled tone.

"It's something with Mom and Dad and Uncle Will, who was killed in the Second Solar wars in a rather gruesome way, something with a slow, radiation filled death."

They fall silent again as they approach the asteroid starbase and now begin to notice that it is not normal. On top of the _Gunther Lutjens_ sitting at its berth at the starport, He noticed a large, grey wedge shaped ship, nearly four times as long and twice as tall as the _Gunther Lutjens_, there was a single large character in katakana: "シ" Indicating that it was one of the newer Japanese carriers, the _Shoukaku_, as beautiful as the name of the ship was, the ship itself was butt-ugly. It looked rough and hewn together in comparison to the sleek ships of Mars and the simple-but-ingenious construction of the Earth ships. For a Zimmerit ship, it was unusual to see a capitol ship without a large contingent of destroyers and cruisers in tow.

"So new Japan is involved in this too, I would assume so, 'cuz all of you girls are all named after Japanese ships from World War Two," Jean said under his breath so that neither of the other two could hear him.

"So what's for breakfast?" Nancy piped up as they were exiting the transport, "I'm rather hungry and you wouldn't let us eat at home, I demand to know."

"Dang, when did you become such a prima donna, with your command of the tankery team and finally demands of your current captain. I'll have you put in the bring as soon as we're on the ship," Jean retorts with a sarcastic tone.

Again, like the night before, the station is uncharacteristically empty, thanks to Empress Jessica's executive orders. They make their way back to the sme lobby, but this time, instead of being put under surgical fluorescent lighting, large amounts of sunlight filter through the ships in the starport into the windows, giving the hallway a mellow glow, almost as if they were three students walking in a skywalk across a large metropolis during sunset. At the end of the hallway, all the chairs had been cleared out and replaced by several round tables and a simple buffet line for food. It was rather empty and ghostly, as there was no one in the room yet, save for the three of them. That was when two people walked in, one of them was Shevonne, the other, the one with the thong from last night looking like a younger version of herself, helping to carry food trays to the buffet table. Shevonne waved to them and beckoned for them to follow her back into the nearby kitchens.

Upon entering the kitchens, they noted that aside from some boilers full of coffee and hot water. There were also the assorted sugar, cream, and other things neatly arranged on several baskets. It came up to a simple breakfast, typically french, as most of the trays had unsweetened pastries and small jars of jam were laid out on the buffet table with the rest of the food, hardly a breakfast befitting an Empress.

Five minutes later, the breakfast was all set up and all of the kanmusu and the officers already present on the station were called into the room. Breakfast commenced with alot of people making a mad rush for the pastries. Shevonne was constantly telling people off for crowding the table.

There were several extra people present, most notably another Zimmerit Admiral, in the form of a thin girl with white hair.

* * *

10 minutes later, Jean and nancy found themselves sitting around a table with Minerva and several of the ship girls, Akagi, Suzuya, and Samidare.

Akagi, being identified as a Fleet carrier, is significantly larger in nearly every aspect in comparison to the small destroyers, she wore a miko uniform and had a red skirt. there was a small plate of waist armor that appeared like a flight deck strapped to the front of her waist. She had long brown hair and soft eyes that shone with gluttony. She was quite obviously the glutton, she had more food on her plate than the rest of the people on the table combined.

Suzuya, Heavy Cruiser, going with size and age proportions of real ships, she looked as if she was a junior in high school, with a brown "girl's school" uniform complete with the orange ruffled tie around her neck, thigh-high brown socks, and maryjane shoes. Her elbow-length hair was a light sky blue and was allowed to flow freely behind her ears. Her eyes shone in a dull yellow of innovator ability usage without the associated glow.

Samidare, a destroyer, looked no older than a high school freshman or eighth grader, she had a slightly oblong melon-shaped head with large oval shaped eyes, in each of the eyes, there was what seemed like a jewel of aquamarine. She wore a sleeveless white serafuku with black trim and and a loose, non pleated white skirt. What was most notable about her appearance though, was that she had a single long ponytail that went from her head to her ankles, heck, the ponytail was curved and was probably longer than she was tall. The hair was on a gradient from a deep sea blue near her head and faded into a soft, bluish off-white.

"Damn girl, you eat a whole bunch. Care to share how you eat so much?" Nancy asks Akagi as she snarfs down her fourth Danish Pastry.

"Hmmmm…? Di du day domethin'?" She responds as she looks up from her rather messy plate. at Nancy, who chuckles from the comical look of Akagi with an open mouth with a half eaten croissant and a large glass of black coffee in the other.

Meanwhile, Jean was looking incessantly at the other officers that were present, including the commanders from the Zimmerit Federation and the Earth Republic. He was rather skeptical about working with them, especially since the Zimmerit Federation was an enemy of Mars not too long ago.

Suddenly, an enlisted person rushed into the room with a hurried look and a communique from fleet headquarters on the planet. After nearly overturning several tables on his way in, he slammed the paper into Jessica's hand and quickly left after a quick salute, saying that he had things to take care of that were of utmost importance, enough to forgo the usual respect procedures.

* * *

"So girls, how quickly can you deploy, from, say, now?" Jessica suddenly said as she rose from her seat and firmly said over the chatter, which immediately stopped. "Meridiani Bay is under attack, apparently from a force claiming to be the Abyssal Fleet, we are actually the closest force to them and I would like you to defend the place in a show of your abilities."

At that moment, all of the chatter in the room died down, as not only did she say the statement out loud, but she also projected the thought to each mind in the room. All of the Martian Officers Quickly got out of their seats and exited the room, leaving the fleet girls to quickly finish their meal.

As Jean, Minerva, Jessica, Nancy, and a number of other officers took their seats in a nearby meeting room, another extra person walked into the room, leaning over and whispering something to Jessica. She nodded and turned back out to the rest of the people in the room.

"7th Task Force leaders Commodore Minerva Zabi, Captain Jean Maxim, and Lieutenant Antionelle Passio will deploy directly to the water surface along with the Fleet Girls", she said after a moment of consideration. "This will be an initial test for them, may they prevail, launch will be in 10 minutes in orbital drop pods.

* * *

_11 minutes later _

High above the ionosphere of Mars and beginning final descent of re-entry, 30 orbital drop pods lined up in formation to directly deploy as soon as they touched down. Nagato was in on of the rearguard pods, given her position as a battleship and her role of indirect fire support. She was actually quite apprehensive, given that she has never been in zero gravity, nor has she been in the tiny confines of a Single Operative Orbital Drop Insertion Vehicle. The back of her head was flooding with fear and uncertainty at the aggressive way that they were being deployed to the ground with no training at all.

Suddenly, as they began to enter the stratosphere, the viewport in front of her face started to glow red-hot and the violent shaking started with her head being tossed around in whichever direction. She knew from her short briefing earlier that there was a 2 minute window of there were no possible radio communications as she was entering the atmosphere. Slowly, but surely, each agonizing second ticked by as the violent shaking continued, but something was wrong, very wrong. Below her, she could see the pods in front of her maneuvering hard and trying to dodge shots that burst into clouds of flak. two of the pods in front of her burst, revealing the now dead Shioi from explosive decompression and the burning corpse of Inazuma, who had sprung a leak from a shrapnel hit that slowly increased the temperature of the vehicle until her body has burst into flame from the heat.

"EVASIVE MANEUVERS, REPEAT, EVASIVE MANEUVERS," came Minerva's voice over the radio, shouting, but calm and collected in the face of enemy fire.

Mesmerized from the action around her, Minerva's shouting brought Nagato back to her senses, and finally, she started to scatter like the rest of the task force after a blunt piece of shrapnel hit her pod and failed to penetrate. While maneuvering, she saw the chaos that the flak of still unknown source was instilling on the task force.

When suddenly, Mutsu's pod, which was in front of her, suddenly exploded.

Parts of her appendages and her headband hit Nagato's viewport, causing her to shudder and her blood to run cold. The fear that was at the back of her mind suddenly flooded the rest of her mind, quickly overrunning her thoughts of combat and how to best defeat the Abyssal, fleet below her. The fear took up much of her mind, all the way down to the last several miles, when the pod's retros started firing to prevent her from being flattened to a pancake, although it wasn't far off from it, the landing speed was in the vicinity of 200 miles per hour.

The flak died down momentarily as they hit the water, below the firing arc of the light angle anti-aircraft guns in the distance. Nagato's pod hit the water and sprung open, she instinctively decompressed her large array of 41 cm naval guns as she stepped out of the floating and smoking pod onto the deep blue water. She turned around to see all of the 27 surviving pods floating around her with the battered fleet girls and the person called 'Captain Maxim' stepping out of his pod.

* * *

Frantically counting the number of pods on the water, Jean spits into his radio, "Alright Command and Control, what the shit was that flak all about, we shouldn't have any flak guns firing from the ground that are able to target, much less hit anything that is coming down in re-entry."

Surveying the scene around him. Many of the fleet girls are visibly shaken, but some of the more stoic ones are helping to calm the relatively shell-shocked ones.

"Alright ladies, let's go, the enemy is that way, we will have medics try to collect what is left of the bodies", Jean says rather coldly, "we have an ocean to defend."

They assemble into 3 nine-ship lines and begin cruising towards the coast, with Jean, Minerva, and Antionelle leading the way.

"Nagato, stay back and bombard the enemy as we approach the AO, your primary objective is to keep the enemy units back and protect the carriers along with the rest of the battleships. Antionelle will direct your fire, she is a sniper after all."

Jean, who was a close combat specialist, was sailing at the front of his respective line with the destroyers, who were also close combat specialists, with their fearsome torpedoes and high speed.

Minerva, a special ops veteran, naturally lead a strike force of light and heavy cruisers, offering flexibility as a support force that would go between supporting destroyers with covering fire and using their awesome anti-air abilities to down enemy bombers.

"Sir," Nagato speaks up, " my sensors are now able to identify the ship composition of the enemy fleet. From the formation layout and the ship composition, it is a carrier task force."

"What do you recommend we do then, you seem to be their natural leader anyways", Jean lazily lofts back at her.

" I recommend holding distance and using battleship advantage we have to pummel the fleet first before sending close combat people to wipe up the -"

"That tactic would be sound if you were conducting the battle of Jutland, but we are 300 years past that, _Mademoiselle_," Jean says to cut her off.

Broadcasting over quantum brainwaves, which he knew fleet girls were capable of (more mentally taxing, but more secure connection and he was not sure if they had built-in radios anyway) at least receiving. His eyes glowing the trademark dirty yellow of quantum brainwave use.

_Attention personnel, we will be splitting into the groups that we are currently already divided into. Battleships and Carriers are to provide shelling and air cover respectively, carriers, launch all fighters to protect fleet, no need to waste time using torpedo bombers and dive bombers on a larger force that will swat them out of the sky. Cruisers will be following Minerva in first to try to lure in the escorts before annihilating them. Destroyers will take advantage of the opening to cut the carriers down with torps. Battleships are to pick off larger escort ships at opportunity, understood?_

"YES SIR", came the chorus from behind.

The smoke in the distance was getting more defined now, with burning buildings in the nearby harbor city. Tone sent out a recon plane, showing the exact locations of enemy fleet which was sending wave after wave of bombers to terrorize the city, several Ri-class heavy cruisers were approaching the jetties, apparently trying to get into the city directly to search for something. To Jean's knowledge, the small non-military police force that was present had nothing to counter the approaching fleet.

Upon confirmation of the enemy carriers, which numbered over 8, Akagi, Zuikaku, Taihou, and Soryuu launched all their Zero fighters to meet the wall of Abyssal torpedo and dive bomber squadrons approaching. The destroyers, biding their time for the cruisers to lure away the escorts, form a second ring around the first ring of battleships, which in turn was surrounding the carriers. Akizuki's Choujuusenchihou-chan turrets pointed up at the incoming aircraft, which were nearest to her, and immediately cut down several with bursts of fragmentation shell fire. In response, the droves of abyssal dive bombers pelted her repeatedly, knowing that she was the lynchpin in the impressive anti-aircraft defense, guided by the sophisticated gun director radars on Akizuki and Antionelle, who was also being focus fired along with the carriers, who were providing the bulk of the air support, cutting down the majority of the attacking planes.

In the chaos, Akizuki had her left turret blown clean off by a 500 kg armor piercing bomb. Losing one of her anti aircraft turrets allowed a large number of planes to break through her still impressive flak wall to attack the battleships and carriers behind her, which were vulnerable to the large number of torpedoes that were now being launched, Bismarck had her left foot blown clean off and was bleeding profusely, having being taken out in a similar manner to her World War 2 counterpart, and being immobilized. Her guns still blazing, had taken out the whole squadron of torpedo bombers that had ravaged her. She was not going down this time in the same way. Jean was busily using the flight abilities that his Infantry suit was built with to swipe large amounts of the abyssal planes out of the sky with his plasma broadsword and cover the fleet girls as they were clambering to dodge the continuous streams of abyssal bombs and torpedoes. Many of the fleet girls were able to escape unscathed, especially if their battle abilities, like Murakumo or Akatsuki, were not as potent when in comparison to the other ones like Akizuki or Bismarck.

* * *

Meanwhile, Minerva and the cruisers were sneaking out behind the sea stacks bordering the outside of the harbor.

"There don't seem to be anything other than those 4 Ri-class cruisers at the moment on the jetty or within detection range," Agano reports to Minerva.

"In that case, use the sea stacks and the large waves to hide your presence as we approach. Do all of you have some sort of jump-boosting ability that lets you jump several meters into the air to launch onto the jetty to assassinate the cruisers? I would also prefer to capture one for interrogation," Minerva orders.

"Yes, and Yes Ma'am", was the chorus of replies. As they ready themselves behind either side of the large boulders that line the jetty, They launch themselves up and over the edge of the jetty and immediately kill 3 of the cruisers, one via beheading with a plasma saber from Minerva, one being bludgeoned into pieces from the shots of numerous 203 mm shells, and one being blinded then quartered by the agano class cruisers. By the time the last one turns around and sees what has happened, her eyes had already been shot out by Noshiro, who was closest to her. The rest pile on top of her and pin her down.

Minerva walks up to the cruisers face, which is mangled by six 155 mm rounds hitting it in the most vulnerable of places and is profusely bleeding out, evidently, the Heavy Cruiser will bleed out within a few minutes, so Minerva works quickly to extract information.

"How did you get the information to this site?" she first asks, "and what

"Our grand admiral of course, the all knowing one," The cruiser spits back. "You'll never know what his grand plans for the universe are for and even if you do find-"

Tired of the Ri's monologuing, Minerva shoves her index and middle fingers into the eyes of the cruiser and simply hacks into her visual memories via the optical nerve endings. After she saw what she wanted, she put the cruiser out of her misery with a single plasma bolt to the head.

"Let's go, this does not sound good for us, we need to take out the rest of the escorts," she said to her team, which consisted of the complete Agano class, Tone class, Maya, Choukai, and herself. They jumped off the jetty and sped towards the battle zone to punch a hole in the defenses of the destroyers. Minerva fried the brains of the rest of the other three cruisers with a quick stab from her beam saber to prevent reactivation.

* * *

"Damn, there was no end to those guys, anyone cared to count how many we have killed in the air defense op?" Jean says in an almost sarcastic manner to no one in particular after the end of the brutal air assault that seriously hurt many of the destroyers and some of the capital ships, "anyhow, I think those carriers are finally out of planes to launch at us for the time being. We need to start taking out those capital ships."

"Antionelle," he orders, "have the carriers and the battleships start hosing down the place with their big guns. Use your sniper to take out the carriers one by one if you can, Battle ships should herd the bigger ships into a small area so we can saturate the area with torpedoes."

Jean starts to lead the destroyers on their torpedo run, in classic manner, in a straight line at the enemy before dropping the torpedoes and turning tail. out here in the open water, the torpedoes have an easy run up to the large ships, but the abyssal destroyers, who were focused on screening the carriers from the battleships' shelling fall into disarray as a large amount of torpedoes unleashed by no less than eight destroyers head into the fray to break apart the formations. The effect of the combined torpedo and shelling attack is spectacular, with many of the destroyers running into shellfire trying to dodge the torpedoes and vice versa.

A small portal opens near the carriers as they begin their retreat, one of them is gunned down, her hat completely removed before she was able to reach the portal, which promptly disappears, along with the rest of the destroyers, which simply vanish into thin air.

Noting this, Jean says over open radio, "how the fuck do wormhole appear out of nowhere to spirit away the capital ships and then take the destroyers with them."

Antionelle responds, " and how did they arrive in the first place, there was no indication of ships arriving on the surface having any of these strange quantum signatures, and also, they would have to have sailed for some time to get here if they landed anywhere other than the spot we landed at."

Their conversation ends as they begin to assign some members of the force to tow the immobilized members of the fleet to the docks, some 30 kilometers away.

Jean Takes note of the wailing of some of the members of the fleet, especially the destroyer Akatsuki, who had lost a friend, Inazuma, during the treacherous drop into the atmosphere.

He shuddered at the thought of if they had tried to all go down in a transport instead of drop pods, one strike from that murderous flak would have taken them all out.

Bismarck had to be towed by 4 destroyers on account of her lost left foot. Teruzuki had apparently become a paraplegic with stumps left for her two arms, she thankfully did not bleed out due to Antionelle using a beam tomahawk to cauterize the wounds.

"I asked for adventure in joining the military after the war, not this bullshit," Jean muttered to himself, shaking his head.

* * *

Shrugging off the fact that the original plan had gone to waste knowing the information from the cruiser leader that she unceremoniously hack the brain of, she led the cruisers of the fleet into the now-evacuated city towards the address that she extracted from the cruiser. The building was derelict, but had the distinct markings of recent activity, ranging from freshly flaked paint down to exposed metal on the rails of the door where the wheels of the warehouse recently rolled. The nine of them, having already packed their equipment away, had to resort to Minerva shooting the lock out ( none of the ship girls had side arms yet) for them to open the door. Inside the apparently empty warehouse, Minerva walked up to an old seemingly analog factory crane controller and ripped off the covering, to reveal a small LCD screen underneath the 'battery cover'. the LCD screen asked for a fingerprint.

Instead of showing her fingerprint which would lock her out (her hunch anyways, knowing how tight these things would get in security), she tapped the wires directly, using her Class A Innovator powers to hack the device, her left eye momentarily going red and black. The panel in the middle of the floor opened outwards and up came a platform with a large white spherical something, probably a capsule, that opened with a large hiss and release of glowing bright red gasses.

Inside, was a girl, rather tall and skinny, with a single side ponytail and much longer sweeping snow-white hair. She was dormant, and scantily clad, much like the Ri class cruisers that they had encountered earlier. Her skin was so white and pale that one would almost think that she was simply covered in white paint. Her skin and features were accentuated by the broken top of the black serafuku that barely covered her medium-large breasts and the broken skirt that barely covered her genitals.

Yahagi called out to Minerva, who was on a platform overlooking the warehouse floor.

"Ma'am, this is clearly an abyssal ship and the nameplate here reads 'Abyssal Aircraft Carrier Princess'"

"I'll call in a transport to take her back to our ship, and we can analyze her there out of the prying eyes of the admiralty. They honestly are not to be trusted."

* * *

A/N: So people, what a long break it has been. I ran into serious writer's block in the beginning of May withe start of AP/IB testing and have finally broken that block after a nearly 4 month break. I hope that I can bring the next chapter out to you guys soon.

I also plan to start some one shots of this universe to help to do some exposition outside of this story, it just seems too cumbersome to condense every last thing into one story, or is it? Please tell me in the comments.

Again, please leave your input and ideas for how to improve, I have loosely based this on a combination of the Gundam multiverse, Kancolle, Star Trek, and Halo, so please give me ideas on how to incorporate these ideas into the story.

Thanks for reading guys! :D


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